April 21, 2008
MCP Magazine News
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Greg's Weekly quickTIP: Hooray for Transactional Integrity!
More
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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Greg's Weekly quickTIP: Hooray for Transactional
Integrity!
- Redmond Radio: SQL Server 2008 Goes Spatial; XP SP3 Soon?
More
- Special Offers: Office 2007 Migration; Remote Desktop
Management
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GREG'S WEEKLY QUICKTIP: Hooray for Transactional Integrity!
By Greg Shields
Image-level backups are a great benefit gained when an IT
environment
moves to virtualization. These single-file backups allow the
state of
an entire server to be restored without all the
thousand-file nastiness
required in a traditional backup. Lose one key file with
old-school
backups and you're staring down a road of rebuilding instead
of a
restore. Conversely, an image-level backup consolidates that
server's
state into one nice and tidy bundle.
All this sounds fine and well until you start to dig a
little deeper
into the processes whereby image-level backups go about
quiescing that
server prior to a backup. You see, pretty much every
hypervisor-based
virtualization solution has the capability to quiesce the
server prior
to starting the backup. This "snapshotting"
mechanism ensures that the
restored file has file system integrity.
But there's always been a problem with transactional
databases that ride
atop that file system. Though any traditional backup tools
could quiet
the server, none to date could reach into that server to
tell these
databases they needed a time out as well.
The result of this omission is that although image-level
restores
usually get your server back on-line relatively quickly,
your Exchange,
SQL and other transactional databases have the chance to
return to
service in an inconsistent state. This means running the
necessary
database utilities -- like ESEUTIL for Exchange -- to bring
the database
back to health.
Until now. I recently discovered that VizionCore's vRanger
Pro v3.2
includes support for directly communicating with a Windows
virtual
machine's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). This
communication allows
the backup engine to instruct the database to pause at the
correct
point in the backup so that the database will not return
from a restore
in an inconsistent state.
The vRanger documentation includes an in-depth discussion of
how this
works with VSS. The process is complex and yet elegant in
its
implementation. Now, we administrators get to shout for joy
knowing
that with the right products our virtualized databases can
maintain
transactional integrity -- and therefore complete
restorability -- while
we do our nightly backups.
Comment: http://mcpmag.com/columns/article.aspx?editorialsid
=2587#post
AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: Greg Wants your
Very
Best SMS/SCCM Queries
Query creation in SMS & SCCM is an art, and building the
very best
queries for collections and reports is key to doing SMS
& SCCM well.
Contributing Editor Greg Shields wants to showcase your very
best
queries for an upcoming Redmond column. Help out a fellow
administrator and get a free Redmond T-shirt to boot!
Greg Shields, MCSE: Security, CCEA, is an independent
author,
instructor, and consultant based in Denver, Colo. A
contributing
editor to Redmond magazine, MCPmag.com and a popular speaker
at
TechMentor events, Greg?s recent book Windows Server 2008:
What's
New/What's Changed, is now available at www.sapienpress.com.
gshields redmondmag.com
Check out MCPmag.com's column archive for more savvy tips
and tricks
from Jeff, Greg Shields, Chris Wolf and other frequent
contributors.
http://mcpmag.com/columns/
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REDMOND RADIO for Week of April 21
Hosted by Michael Domingo
Take a quick listen to what made news last week in the world
of
Redmond and IT:
* SQL Server 2008 Goes Spatial
* XP SP3 Release Rumored Soon
* Project Albany Goes Up Against Google Apps
* PCI Publishes Customer Data Secuity Guidelines
Plus, listen to find out how to enter the weekly Redmond
T-Shirt Giveaway:
http://mcpmag.com/webcasts/mcpradio/radio.asp?id=288
iTunes/iPodder listeners: Download the show automatically by
pointing
your applet at http://mcpmag.com/rs
s/podcasts/.
Problems listening to the podcast? Write to mdomingo1105media.com
and describe the problem to get help. We want you to listen
if you
want to hear it!
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